Why We Eat Our Own Dog Food

A recent blog from marketing guru Seth Godin got me thinking about the concept of eating your own dog food. Dogfooding (as it is sometimes called) is when a company uses its own product internally, with the implication being that what’s good enough for the customer is good enough for the company. Originally the idea came from Alpo dog food commercials, in which spokesman Lorne Greene earnestly assured us that Alpo is so good, he feeds it to his own dogs. Since then, and one famous Microsoft memo later, the term has become common among software companies that feel it beneficial to use their own product internally.

Pardot uses our own product internally for the same basic reason our customers do: to enhance our Sales team’s efficiency and maximize ROI. Just as you do, we use Prospect Insight to identify visitors to our website, track prospect activity, and score and grade leads. Our Marketing team can then pass on the most qualified leads to our Sales team so that they concentrate their efforts accordingly, while Marketing can continue to nurture other promising prospects until they’re ready to be handed over to Sales. Prospect Insight’s real-time sales alerts help the Pardot Sales team stay constantly updated on new prospect activity, and our Marketing team uses it to manage and qualify tradeshow leads for targeted follow-up. It’s a great set of tools that suits all of our marketing automation needs.

But there are other reasons as to why we eat our own dog food here at Pardot. Using our own product:

Synchronizes our interests with those of our customers. Customers want an oustanding product–and so do we, because we use it too!

Helps us continually improve the product. Using PI internally makes it easy to identify possible improvements and cool new features that enhance both the user experience and the product’s overall value.

Demonstrates, in a tangible and unambiguous way, that we stand behind our product and think it’s a good one. We could use any product but choose to use Prospect Insight because we think it’s the best marketing automation solution out there.